Newer Technology Voyager S3 USB 3.0 Dock turns any HDD/SSD into storage for instant access

Test Configuration & Driver Release Notes

Test Configuration

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i7 3770K (overclocked to 4.5GHz); Turbo is on.
• EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard (Intel Z77 chipset, latest beta BIOS, PCIe 3.0 specification; CrossFire/SLI 16x+16x using Plex chip.)
• 8GB Kingston DDR3 PC1866 Kingston RAM (4×2 GB, dual-channel at 1866MHz; supplied by Kingston)
• Sapphire Vapor-X CPU cooler, on loan from Sapphire
• Newer Technology Voyager S3 USB 3.0 Dock, supplied by Newer Technology
• Nvidia GTX 680 (2GB, 1006/6008MHz, reference clocks), supplied by Nvidia
• Onboard Realtek Audio
• Genius SP-HF 800A speakers, two pairs in 4.0 Quadraphonic configuration, supplied by Genius
• OWC 240GB Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD on loan from OWC
• Kingston 240GB HyperX SSD and Kingston 240GB HyperX 3K SSD, both supplied by Kingston
• Thermaltake ToughPower 775 W power supply unit supplied by Thermaltake
• Thermaltake Overseer RX-I full tower case, supplied by Thermaltake
• Philips DVD SATA writer
• HP LP3065 2560×1600 thirty inch LCD
• ASUS VG278 27″ 3D Vision 2 Ready 120Hz display, supplied by ASUS

Test Configuration – Software

• NVIDIA GeForce WHQL 310.90. High Quality; Single-display Performance mode; Prefer Maximum Performance
• HD Tune v2.55 (free demo version)
• Windows 7 64-bit; very latest updates with Latest DirectX
• All software is patched to their latest versions.

The benchmarks

HD Tune 2.55

HD Tune is a hard disk utility. We are using the default setting of 64KB blocks for testing in the free version. We run the standard benchmark first on our Kingston HyperX SSD.

Next we run the same benchmark on the 240 GB Kingston HyperX 3K SSD which is tested in the Voyager S3 dock but over USB 2.0: The internal drive is nearly ten times faster.  Let’s look at the same Kingston 240GB HyperX 3K SSD in the same Voyager 3 dock, but now connected via the USB 3.0 interface.This time the transfer rate is over two-thirds of the speed of the internal drive.  Transferring data over USB 3.0 is quite fast, especially when compared with USB 2.0.

Actual Usage

There are occasions during normal daily computing where one would need the services of the Voyager S3. If one needs to access an external drive for storage, this device makes it a breeze.   The Voyager S3 is valuable for doing regular backups and a system restore from image in a timely fashion can be critical.

For benching, it is important to create identical clones of the same partition on multiple drives.  Using USB 2.0 and imaging 200GB of data from one HyperX SSD to another using the Voyager S3, it took 1 hour and 24 minutes.  In contrast, imaging the same data over USB 3.0 only took 14 minutes!!

Using the Voyager S3, copying the 9.8GB installaton files of Crysis 2 over USB 2.0 took five and one-half minutes while using the same dock and USB 3.0 only took 1 minute and ten seconds.  Saving time is something that everyone can relate to.  And the end user will save a lot of time by using the Voyager S3 to transfer large files.

Compatibility

Occasionally we found issues with our Thermaltake dock being unable able to eject a drive without a reboot, or for failing to identify a drive when using Acronis disk imaging software.  Using the Voyager S3, we never encountered these issues.  It is a very easy way to reliably transfer large amounts of data very quickly.  If a PC user doesn’t have USB 3.0, there are add-in PCIe cards that have this functionality.  Let’s check out our conclusion